Description: The Retirement Plans Experience Committee (RPEC) hired Ernst & Young to perform a literature review and assessment of mortality improvement rates in the United States population.

Description: This article is a follow up to an article in the February, 1977 issue of the actuary, which was a discussion of the article, Sex and the Single Table. This article is a reply by Barbara J. Lautzenheiser, FSA, author of Sex and the Single Table, to a comment her original article generated. This current article again provides an excellent explanation of actuarial risk classification practices, and of the legal and social issues used to argue against risk classification, noting that if society does favor policy that overrides risk classification based on gender, such as promoting unisex tables for determining pension payments, then the implications should be understood.

Description: Discusses the symposium, “The Future of Life Expectancy,” on March 10-11, to address how employment is affected by longevity.

Description: This 1977 article discusses demographic trends and the projected downward trend in mortality for the next 25 years in the United States, and its implications for social insurance programs. In particular the author identifies potential problems with the current structure of Social Security, and offers alternative suggestions for improving its financial soundness.

Description: Actuaries have been indebted to the Statistical Bureau of the Metropolitan Life for studies in vital statistics associated with the names of Dublin, Lew and Spiegelman and a recent study by Quint and Cody is in this tradition. It is headed Preeminence and Mortality and was presented to the Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association last November. This article shares further perspectives about longevity, and the characteristics of people who experience long lives.

Description: In this expository paper several comments are made with respect to the statistical independence of the curtate future lifetime and the fractional part of the future lifetime, both of a general status. In particular, the conditions for independence need to be stated carefully. The last-survivor status is cited as an example. More general assumptions than the uniform distribution of deaths assumption are then considered, together with applications to insurances, annuities, and reserves. Similar results to those under the uniform distribution of deaths assumption are obtained. Brief comments are made with respect to contingent probabilities in multiple lives and multiple decrement theory.

Description: This article is a review and discussion of the article, “Sex and the Single Table: Equal Monthly Retirement Income for the Sexes? By Barbara J. Lautzenheiser, FSA, appearing in the Fall 1976 issue of Employee Benefits Journal. The author of this article found it to be an informed discussion in the defense of actuarial risk classification practices, and of the legal and social issues used to argue against risk classification based on gender, such as promoting unisex tables for determining pension payments.

Description: This article talks about longevity risk and reinsurance and its global challenges.

Description: In this paper, we derive three important longevity Greeks on the basis of an extended version of the Lee-Carter model that incorporates stochastic volatility.

Description: This article presents recent perspectives on the understanding and measurement of pandemic risk.